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| exercise in style 1 |
Day One of Exercises in Style A Mini Series - explained here - random posting.
The Original.
They found the old man slumped by the front
door, it was night and the temperature had dropped but he was wearing a woollen
hat.
All, the same they put a blanket round him
to keep him warm.
“Why didn’t you go in?” they asked, “It’s
open.”
He looked up at them as if he didn’t
understand their language; his skin was cracked and sore, like an old
alligator, yet his eyes seemed to reach out from somewhere deep within.
They were blue; a watered-down blue, faded
like an ocean in an old photograph.
When he spoke it was in a mumble, mostly
incoherent.
“I knew it would have been a mistake,” he
said “I would have opened the bottle, and then we would have both been empty.”
They looked around.
On the floor of the terrace was a broken
bottle, a trickle of wine like blood from an open wound.
An empty glass stood on the table.
“He must have drunk most of it,” they
observed.
Later they took him to prison; it wasn’t
the first time this had happened and the owners filed charges.
“It’s for the best”, they reasoned. “He’s
harmless, eventually, but after the third glass he gets euphoric and then
there’s no knowing where his madness will lead.”
They showed the police the garden where all
the roses had been uprooted.
They cleared them from the table and
pointed out the heart that had been carved into the grain.
They all tried to read the name that was
engraved there.
ab/136
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